Tag: mixed media

Bruno Vekemans

Bruno Vekemans, “De Zwemmer (The Swimmer)”, 1995, Mixed Media on Paper, 85 x 115 centimeters

Bruno Vekemans was born in Antwerp on July 29, 1952. As a child and teenager he is constantly engaged in drawing and painting. Vekemans took one preparatory year of decoration and a two-year interior decoration course at the Technicum Institute, Londenstraat, Antwerp.

In 1971 Vekemans started experimenting with different techniques, experimenting with collages, églomisé and comics. In 1988 his art work was focused on linear works, mostly gouache on pattern paper. Vekemans later replaced the paper patterns with seventeeth century paper and started experimenting with oils on canvas.

Bruno Vekemans has been in several international exhibitions in Tokyo, New York, Paris, and Amsterdam, among others. Influenced by his travels, he has recently completed two thematic series on Africa and Cuba.

Image reblogged with thanks to https://thunderstruck9.tumblr.com

 

Matthew William Robinson

Matthew William Robinson, Three Untitled Paintings, Mixed Media, 2011

Robinson grew up in a small town in northern Connecticut, the area was affected by the housing boom of the 1990’s. He spent his early college years in Johnstown/Gloversville,ny, and New Britain Connecticut. Both areas were post industrial cities, now depressed areas that displayed elaborate and beautiful city structure but left to waste away. Later, Robinson moved to Brooklyn where he became interested in gentrification, historical architecture and surrounding topics of urban living. “My work is a thought process, study of man made worlds and study of formal painting.”

Claude Buck

Claude Buck, “Sunburst”, Gouache, Watercolor, Pencil, Pen and Colored Ink on Paper, 1913, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC

Claude Buck was born in New York City on July 3, 1890. His father was a traditionally trained, commercial artist, and introduced Buck to drawing at age 4. The young Buck copied Greek classics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and at age 14 entered the National Academy of Design, taking classes in still life with Emil Carlsen, figure drawing with Francis Jones, and figure painting George DeForest Brush. He studied there until age 22, receiving eight prizes. Buck then studied in Munich and upon his return began a busy schedule of exhibitions.

He moved to Chicago in 1919, teaching painting for some years at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago (SAIC), and becoming a leading member of an avant-garde symbolist artists’ group known as the Introspectives. The group, whose members shared an approach to expressing subjective emotion and experience in their work, included, both Rudolph Weisenborn and Emil Armin. Buck, a modernist, was influenced by writers Edgar Allen Poe and William Blake and eccentric visionary painters Ralph Blakelock and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

He often depicted allegories and literary themes drawn from Romantic sources such as Poe’s poetry, operas by Richard Wagner, as well as classical mythology and the New Testament. He made highly finished still lifes and “hyperrealistic” portraits to support himself and his family. Buck spent the last years of his life in Santa Cruz, and is often considered a California artist despite his deep connections to Chicago.

Robert Del Tredici

Robert Del Tredici, “Ubiquitous”, 2014, Mixed Media Print on Metallic Paper, New Bedford Whaling Museum

Robert Del Tredici started out as a pen-and-ink landscape-maker in the Marin county hills of California. His first big project was a series of 100 illustrations to “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville. He then took up street photography, made portraits of film-makers, and, with the near-meltdown at the Three Mile Island, started documenting the nuclear age.

His first book, “The People of Three Mile Island”, published in 1980, led to a 1987 book written about the entire US nuclear weapons complex, “At Work in the Fields of the Bomb”. Following its publication, he traveled to the former Soviet Union and photographed nuclear towns and facilities there.

Del Tredici is the founder of The Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective of photographers dedicated to making visible the nuclear age. Since 2001 he has been creating collages depicting the era of the War on Terror, a series he calls “Evolution Pages 9/11”.

In the mixed media print “Ubiquitous”, artist Del Tredici captions an image of the phases of the moon, with Moby Dick breaching in between them. A quotation from Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” about ghostly sightings of the whale is written at the bottom left.

“One of the wild suggestions coming to be linked with white whale in the minds of the superstitously inclined was the unearthly conceit that Moby Dick was ubiquitous, that he had actually been encountered in opposite latitudes at one and the same instant of time.”